Europe @ 2.4 km/h (26 page)

750-752 km

In Nuremberg I am lucky enough to find a hostel just metres from the medieval town wall. This summer of showers continues but it’s worth braving them long enough to buy a steaming
Bratwurstl
(grilled-sausage) roll, just to discover why Nuremberg’s
wurst
is Germany’s best.

Late into the night, a talented guitarist and fellow guest all the way from Dortmund — Markus Hartkopf, lead singer of the John Porno Band — keeps us mesmerised with an impromptu concert that is all the more agreeable for being washed down with a delectable moselle.

756-759 km

By coincidence, I am in town at the same time of year as the Nuremberg rallies were held from 1933 until 1939. In a former SS barracks out at Luitpoldhain, a museum with the rather off-putting title of Dokumentationzentrum shows how the Nazis employed a mixture of thuggery and flattery to take over Nuremberg years before they became the masters of Germany.

Nuremberg in the Twenties was a Bremen of the south, a stronghold of the liberals and Social Democrats. The first Nazi rally was held here in 1927, and violence by Hitler’s stormtroopers during a 1929 rally led to a ban on the party holding any more. So, if their thuggery was no secret, why was Nazism so popular among Germans in the 1930s? That’s where the flattery came in. Hitler tapped the yearning for lost greatness by harking back to a medieval myth that had never corresponded with reality. That was the point of orchestrating torchlight processions before hundreds of thousands at Nuremberg.

By 1933, with the progressive forces ousted from power, Nazi Mayor Liebl declared Nuremberg ‘the most German of all German cities’. Later, Hitler would designate five Fuhrer cities: Nuremberg, Munich, Hamburg, Berlin and Linz, in his native Austria. The comparison with Soviet Hero Cities is inescapable. Since when did telling the voters they are the best in the world ever do a politician any harm?

Inspecting the captions on a wall full of photos, I shake my head. Can it be? Yes, Hitler was in Nuremberg exactly 70 years ago today. There he is, reviewing Wehrmacht troops in front of the opera house about 50 metres from my bedroom, directly over the town wall, on 6 September 1937, the Day of Welcome. In the evening he returned to attend a performance of
Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg
(Wagner, but of course).

This part of town used to be leisure grounds. They were destroyed by the Nazis but, with beautiful symmetry, the Park-Cafe Wanner was re-established in 2006. And now, outside the documentation centre, I stand in the vault of the 50,000-seat open-air Congress Hall, the largest example of National Socialist architecture still standing. As I peer up at the Fuhrer’s stand, and imagine him accepting the plaudits of the ecstatic crowd, my ears pick up melodic strains from the traditional German repertoire.

I wheel through the entrance arch, follow the lakeside path round, and in front of me is a fairground. Where seven decades ago ‘fascination and terror’ were created on the grandest of scales, today’s children laugh heedlessly, and the only screams of fear come from those oppressed by gravity on the Roll Over ride. The Nürnberger Volksfest fun park is nearing the end of its annual two-week carnival. All the fun of the fair from coconut-shies to shooting galleries is here, but the image of bliss that will remain with me long afterwards is of a young mother dancing with her baby, both swaying to the rhythm of
(I’ve Had)
The Time of My Life
(‘No, I never felt like this before’).

763-768 km

As the express train sped north-east from Nuremberg to Dresden, I longed, just this once, to escape the orbit of cities. Once arrived in Dresden, my plan was to take a spur-line train and ‘hop off’ at a small Saxon town or village, it mattered not which one.

The station assistant, Caroline, suggested Kurort Rathen. I liked the sound of the name without having a clue in what direction it lay. Ramps were available only at the bigger stations, Caroline warned me. Never mind, I told her, I would ask one of the other passengers to help me down to the platform. There were only two passengers on this ‘train to nowhere’ but the driver left his cabin to help one of them get me down. Before resuming his journey he pointed vaguely into the darkness towards a murky stretch of water, and I obediently headed downhill. A floating pontoon crossed the waterway, and its operator somehow managed to communicate that we were on the River Elbe near the Czech frontier. I wasn’t the first person to think this was ‘nowhere’. As I later learnt, in communist times this area was called
Tal
der Ahnungslosen
, or the Valley of the Clueless, because it was the only part of East Germany unable to receive TV transmissions from the West.

On the far shore, now, I could see this was a river resort, little more than a hamlet, whose few hotels were A-frame lodges unlikely to be accessible even if affordable. With little confidence I pushed into the one hotel whose entrance I could negotiate. The receptionist looked as though she’d seen a ghost and warned that the last available room was on the first floor but, after I demonstrated that bumming my way up a few stairs was a mere trifle, she relented.

768-772 km

Come daylight it’s a dim light, still drizzling and determined to persist all day. But it’s light enough to see that the hotel I’ve fetched up in resembles a Swiss chalet. That is surely intentional, since this village of Kurort Rathen is situated in the Sächsische Schweiz (Swiss Saxon) national park.

Dismal as the outlook is, I decide not to waste this chance to enjoy the German countryside and set off down a path that runs by a rivulet. Before long, coming from the opposite direction, a hiking party of Germans stops for a chat. They speak English, and I a bare smattering of German, but that’s no excuse for the verbal brick I’m about to drop. Asked my favourite places in Germany, I get so carried away with memories of Monday’s pig-out (the word could not be more apt) that I blurt out, ‘Next time you’re in Munchen you really should go to the Augustiner Brauhaus, they do a fantastic
Schweine-sachsen
’. Open-mouthed at my blunder, they correct me in unison, ‘Schweins-haxen’.

When I query them on the difference, they explain. What I meant to say was ‘knuckle of pork’, what I actually said was ‘Saxon pigs’. Keen to put this gaffe behind me, I ask what part of Germany they come from. ‘Saxony.’

Further into the Rathewalde I go, stopping to chat with two young Berlin women who are hiking on the same trail (except this time I make a mental note to stick strictly to English). We’ve just bought refreshments at a kiosk when a short white-haired man who is serving pushes my resting elbows off the counter where I was occupying a corner — apparently to create space for custom, of which there is none (apart from us). Taking offence on my behalf, one of the young women dismisses him with a phrase I last heard used by that hotelkeeper in Koblenz. ‘Typical German.’

774-779 km

On Saturday evening I was strolling on the path above the water, a couple of minutes beyond the resort, when a boat tied up at the jetty. On heading down a concrete ramp I discovered from the small gathering there that a paddle-steamer service leaves Kurort Rathen, every morning, bound for Dresden.

This morning at 10.30 sharp the ship’s bells of the
PD Pillnitz
chime decorously, as befits her age, and she commences to move downstream with an air of stateliness. The dowager reserves her harshest utterance, a hoot of the klaxon, for cautioning smaller fry and potential trespassers, ‘We have right of way’.

This fleet, which is about to celebrate 125 years of continuous operation, claims to be the world’s oldest set of working paddle steamers. I suppose such a claim could buy the odd argument with a proud steamboat operator on either the Murray or the Mississippi but this vessel is a veteran in her own right.

Newly settled in a polished walnut deck seat whose elegance is only slightly spoilt by a Formica tabletop, I watch the river flow past and then, as we approach the town of Pirna, out comes the sun for the first time in nearly a fortnight. The first mate comes over and bids me welcome, as if it genuinely matters to him. On this cruise I am reminded that when Germans themselves say people from the east are friendlier they are speaking from experience.

Opposite the community of Blasewitz we pass under the Blue Wonder Bridge, so called because of an unforeseen oxidising effect of the paints used in its construction, which created a blue tinge. Dresden, visible at first as a smudge on the horizon, gradually resolves itself into a dreamworld of domes and spires as we wend our way downriver.

I come ashore beneath the grand terrace that overlooks the river, and push my way up a broad road alongside it. Across the way is a new synagogue and, to judge by their dress, a Liberal congregation. But what are they doing here on a Sunday, I wonder. Fortuitously, the second Sunday of September is the one day when, in an ecumenical gesture, Dresden’s Christians visit the synagogue, or Jews go to their churches. This year the synagogue is playing host to the Christians.

Diagonally opposite is a bleak memorial where the old synagogue stood until Kristallnacht. German history is marked by three 9/11s: 9 November 1918, when the German empire collapsed and the Red Flag first flew over Berlin; 9 November 1938, when the Nazis destroyed synagogues and Jewish businesses across the length and breadth of Germany; and 9 November 1989, when the Berlin Wall was brought down.

From 1900 until 1938 the Jewish population of Dresden hovered around 6000. During the German Democratic Republic (GDR), there was a remnant of 60 Jews in Dresden, who performed their observances at home. The city’s current Jewish population is 700, most of them ex-Russians belonging to the Reform congregation.

More than 60 years after the firebombing of Dresden the old city governor’s mansion, the Courland Palais, still lies in ruins. Rebuilt after an 18th-century fire, it was the King of Saxony’s residence from 1806. In an irony that strains credulity, its occupant at the time of the February 1945 bombing was the Association for the Protection of the Saxon Homeland and Culture.

The Icing Sugar Cake is the nickname Dresdeners give their beloved Frauenkirche, a towering church also reduced to rubble in 1945 and whose reconstruction was keenly monitored nationwide right through to its triumphant rededication in 2006. The restoration is magnificent, and Frauenkirche continues to be to Dresden what the Brandenburg Gate is to Berlin, an instantly recognised symbol of the city.

Dresden today may be a replica but it is a convincing one. No city yet seen on my European journey has an architectural ensemble as striking as this one. The Allied (mostly British, some American) destruction that rained from the sky on 13 February 1945 has left a bitterness in many German hearts towards people they regard as war criminals, the unrepentant ‘Bomber Harris’ above all, which decades of peace have not been able to erase.

I had assumed that the ‘sooty’ appearance of many building façades was due to that firebombing or centuries of encrusted grime. One Dresdener tells me, and others confirm, that the buildings look so old because they are artificially patinated to ‘age’ more rapidly than would occur naturally. At first I recoiled from this as a type of deceit but later came to the view that it was understandable. Dresdeners wanted their glittering jewel restored to them without having to wait hundreds of years, and no one should blame them for that. The result is one of the world’s most resplendent cities, right up there with Istanbul and St Petersburg. Wandering around the Aldstadt, I see a piece of blasted earth the size of a large plaza and, behind cyclone wire in one corner of it, what look like Roman ruins. But a noticeboard there, and a Dresden woman who speaks broken English, agree it’s from the 17th century. So what is the plan after the archaeologists have done their work? To turn the site into a multi-storey car park. What the Allies didn’t destroy, the Germans will.

784-797 km

When I told Germans I was going to Bautzen they asked me what crime I had committed. Bautzen is best known as a ‘prison town’ where the GDR sent political dissidents. But what draws me to this most easterly point of my itinerary since leaving Stockholm is curiosity, not crime. For 1500 years now Bautzen has been home to a Slavic people known as the Venns, or Wends, who have struggled to keep their culture afloat upon a German sea.

Wheeling north towards the fairytale backdrop of spires and bastions that dot the skyline, the first thing I notice is that the street signs here are in two languages, German and Wend — even on Karl Marx Strasse (and, yes, that the civic authorities have left that name unchanged nearly twenty years after the demise of state socialism says something, too).

Founded in AD 1002, Bautzen oozes medieval charm but it has been more ruthless with the architectural heritage from its recent past.

Ulrike Reicke, a city librarian, says about 10 per cent of Bautzen’s 40,000 residents are Wends but adds that they prefer to call themselves Sorbs or Sorbians. This is so much the ‘politically correct’ term, she says, that in the GDR era some members of the community could be heard to say, ‘I’m not Venn, I’m
Sorbisch
’. She says they’re the oldest minority in Germany, badly treated in Hitler’s day (as, of course, was every minority) but the Balkan wars of the 1990s failed to engage their sympathies, proof of how 1500 years of separation from the mother lode of heritage can dilute one’s sense of common identity.

The Sorbian Museum’s director, Tomasz Nawka, is a bright and breezy man of about 50, proud of the militantly assertive tradition of Sorbian leaders without which he is sure they would have been assimilated out of existence. In Sir Walter Scott’s great novel
Ivanhoe
, I have read reference to worship of the god Chernibor by what he calls ‘the Wends’ on Black Mountain, about 10 km from Bautzen, and am wondering whether that creed has survived the impress of Christian beliefs. From his defensive reaction — ‘The mountain has no tradition; it’s not very important’ — I can only suspect it has.

On the desk in Tomasz’s office is a toy koala holding two flags, German and Australian. He tells me it is a gift from a Melburnian Sorb, Benno Gotsky, who died only last week. Despite the solemnity of the moment, I decide the best course is to ask him straight out, ‘Are you German?’